Jonas, John,
John Foliot, Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:20:59 -0700 (PDT):
> Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>
>> And yet data shows that the vast majority of people get it wrong.
>
> s/get/got
>
>> http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Longdesc_usage
>> http://blog.whatwg.org/the-longdesc-lottery
>>
>> Do you have data showing otherwise?
>
> Jonas, we've never seen that data. We have instead assertions from 2
> Google employees
Yes, other data could mean looking at the same data from another angle.
The perspective that "they get it wrong" only takes into account that
authors do their best. E.g. the longdesc lottery article takes the view
that near everyone that uses @longdesc are well meaning people that get
it wrong.
My own inspection show that conscious misuse by image gallery authors
is also an important factor (though I wont quantify it). These
developers use it for linking to a fullsize version of the image and
things like that. It is difficult to understand 'long description' to
mean 'larger size'. Hence, it is not about "getting it wrong", but
misuse - may be even well intended misuse. (E.g. rather than adding a
custom attribute, they used @longdesc.)
>> Anyhow, I still haven't heard any arguments against fixing
>> aria-describedby.
Well, I still miss your replies in bug 12243 ... [1] Simply put, what
you call 'fixing' really is that you want aria-describedby to be
something other than it is.
But one way in which @longdesc should take some inspiration from
@aria-describedby is that we should require that it must point to a
page fragment rather than saying that it should point to a page.
Google employees or not: The proposed better checking of @longdesc
URLs, as well as the suggestion that @longdesc URLs must point to a
fragment, are proposals which take the reports about misuse of
@longdesc very seriously.
[1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12243
--
leif halvard silli